Social

Day: August 2, 2018

A few nights ago I watched a Florida rally that was given by Our Dear Leader…..and as usual he gave a litany of his usual points (I would call them high points but they were scraping the bottom of the barrel) and as usual he had something derogatory to say about the news media in attendance…..and the usual response by those in attendance was to yell obscenities and gestures toward those in the press area.

In the low IQ audience I saw several Tees and signs with QAnon….and thought I had missed something…..and apparently I have……

“Q WWG1WGA Trump 2020 Keep America Great! MSM is the enemy,” read the sign spotted by the AP at President Trump’s rally in Tampa on Tuesday night. There are plenty of letters on it, but one stands out: Q. NPR reports that other signs and T-shirts read “QAnon,” a reference to a conspiracy theory that’s picking up steam on the far-right and beginning to garner enough attention that it came up during the White House press briefing Wednesday. What you need to know:

There actually is a Q: “Q” began posting to 4Chan in October 2017 and then shifted to “the even more fringe” 8Chan as well, per the Daily Beast. “Q” happens to be a type of high-level government security clearance, which Q claims to have. The “Anon” part is apparently a reference to both the anonymous Q (who uses the plural “we”) and doubles as a reference to Q’s fans: the Anons.

The lingo doesn’t stop there: Q is purportedly disseminating top-secret info via “breadcrumbs,” which the Daily Beast characterizes as “part poem, part ransom note”; “bakers” follow the crumbs. “No name” is John McCain, “clowns” are those who try to undermine Q.

A breadcrumb: The Beast gives this example, posted in June: “Think SC vote to confirm (coming). / No Name action. / Every dog has its day. / Enjoy the show. / Q”

The conspiracy theory: Thanks to that government clearance, Q claims to know about a “worldwide criminal conspiracy,” which NPR reports revolves around Robert Mueller—who, per Q, isn’t investigating Trump’s campaign or the 2016 election at all. Rather, he was put in place by Trump to investigate Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democrats, with some (like Huma Abedin) supposedly being tracked via secret wearable location devices in advance of the coming “storm”: when they’ll all go to prison for crimes Q followers believe could be anything from participating in a pedophile ring to having a secret pact with Vladimir Putin.

The conspiracy theory, II: To show how wide-ranging things get, the AP writes, “filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the Rothschild family, and Satan also make appearances in discussions.” Another element: the belief that JP Morgan was behind the sinking of the Titanic. The Tampa Bay Times cites one Q proponent as saying Trump’s misspellings in his tweets are clues. CNN adds that the fact that Trump used the number “17” on a number of occasions in his speech Tuesday night fired up clue-seeking Anons, who noted Q is the alphabet’s 17th letter.

Background on “the storm”: In an October 2017 meeting between Trump and military leaders (who, per QAnon thinking, urged Trump to run for president in order to go after the aforementioned criminals), Trump made reference to “the calm before the storm.”

The high-profile follower: Roseanne Barr is an “Anon,” just not an anonymous one: She’s tweeted about QAnon a number of times, including this in late June: “we r the army of truth-wwg1wga.” The “wwg1wga,” stands for “where we go one, we go all.” (Side note from the AP: Valerie Jarrett, the subject of Barr’s now infamous tweet, plays a role in some QAnon theories.)

Why QAnon is getting more press this week: The Washington Post says Tuesday’s Tampa event highlighted the fact that QAnon isn’t just relegated to the corners of the internet at this point.

The White House response: CNN reports QAnons have been pushing for the press to ask Sarah Sanders about Q, which apparently happened Wednesday. Her reply: “The president condemns and denounces any group that would incite violence against any individual.”

This bullsh*t is getting tiring…….the fact that there are morons (I apologize to verified morons) who cannot differentiate between reality and crap smeared across social media. But then where would Dear Leader be without the mental midgets that worship the ground he walks on?

Oh boy this title oughta get the juices flowing from one of my readers….of course because I am what some mental midgets call a “liberal” (BTW a term most on the Left detest) they will immediately assume that this is some sort of Leftist diatribe on how to get everyone’s guns……if that is the case then stop here and make a comment that I will tear apart…..or continue to read and see what this post is about……

Babies, concert goers and high school students have been killed in recent mass shootings, but the grip of the NRA and the gun manufacturers on Republican politicians remains firm. In fact, the NRA, gun manufacturers and Republican politicians are hard to distinguish. The gun industry gives millions every year to the NRA in the form of grants and millions more in the form of advertising in NRA publications. In some cases, a percentage of the sale price of guns and ammo goes directly to the NRA. Politicians receive a similar kickback. In the course of their careers, Sen. John McCain has received nearly $8 million from the NRA; Sen. Richard Burr, $7 million; Sen. Roy Blunt, $4.5 million, Marco Rubio, $3.5 million, etc. All of them together, with compliant Republican presidents, have succeeded in creating a Supreme Court willing to change the plain meaning of the Second Amendment from sanctioning a “well armed militia,” to endorsing a nearly universal right to be armed.

Over the weekend I read a piece where Our Dear Leader wants to revive something that he proposed on his first overseas trip as president to Saudi Arabia…….

The Trump administration is quietly pushing ahead with a bid to create a new security and political alliance with six Gulf Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, in part to counter Iran’s expansion in the region, according to U.S. and Arab officials.

The White House wants to see deeper cooperation between the countries on missile defense, military training, counter-terrorism and other issues such as strengthening regional economic and diplomatic ties, four sources said.

The plan to forge what officials in the White House and Middle East have called an “Arab NATO” of Sunni Muslim allies will likely raise tensions between the United States and Shi’ite Iran, two countries increasingly at odds since President Donald Trump took office.

As I point out in the original post there is already an organization that acts as a NATO style organization…it is called the Arab League…..and as I suspected in the original this proposal was merely as a counter to Iran…..

Trumps group will be made up of the countries that spend the most cash with the US arms dealers….has little to do with the region or the people…..these are not even secondary considerations….but business is the prime motivator.

This is a total waste of time and money. Dear Leader does not think the the original NATO is not working why would a cheap knock-off work?

I know that too many of us are concerned with what is happening around Our Dear Leader and yet our wars continue to rage from Syria to Niger to Asia…..and yes there is still a war raging in Syria and yes US Troops are fighting in it…..

In case yo are interested….you have not heard much about this war because it is slowly showing the facts that we are losing this conflict…..

Syrian regime forces hoisted their flag above the southern town of Daraa and celebrated. Although there is more bloodletting to come, the symbolism was hard to miss. The uprising that began in that town on March 6, 2011, has finally been crushed, and the civil war that has engulfed the country and destabilized parts of the Middle East as well as Europe will be over sooner rather than later. Bashar al-Assad, the man who was supposed to fall in “a matter of time,” has prevailed with the help of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah over his own people.

Washington is too busy over the furor of the day to reflect on the fact that there are approximately 500,000 fewer Syrians today than there were when a group of boys spray-painted “The people demand the fall of the regime” on buildings in Daraa more than seven years ago. But now that the Syria conflict has been decided, it’s worth thinking about the purpose and place of the United States in the new Middle East. The first order of business is to dispose of the shibboleths that have long been at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the region and have contributed to its confusion and paralysis in Syria and beyond.

In case you have been under a Trumpian rock……there are also Russian troops fighting in Syria…..and along with Assad’s forces are about to win this war outright……is there a lesson there?

During the height of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the common buzzword among the US military and the pundits analysing the wars was counterinsurgency.

The much-feted generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, gave briefing after briefing on how to win through unconventional tactics. Their strategy was to think like the insurgents, capture their space and deny them physical and moral support. Yet for more than a decade Iraq and Afghanistan have remained firmly out of the US sphere of influence, with both countries still far from secure and the US military having to rely on regional countries for survival.

In Syria, however, the Russians are now demonstrating Machiavellian skills that are defining what success looks like on the battlefield. For the first time in modern history, a foreign military intervention has triumphed in the Middle East.

I read a piece that asked an important question….how long will foreign troops remain in Syria?

There are four major powers who have military forces in Syria.

Two of them, Iran and Russia, are there on the invitation of the Syrian regime – while the other two, Turkey and the United States, are not. These four powers all have different objectives, and, at present, it remains unclear which will stay for the long-run and which will withdraw.